In March, Ravinia Festival announced that it would open “a major addition to the park, the RaviniaMusicBox Experience Center, later this summer.”
It presents Bernstein as composer, conductor, political liberal, teacher, and media darling: “the greatest and most important classical music figure in American history.” Exhibits include a Bernstein baton, broken by Venezuelan prodigy Gustavo Dudamel, who’s there on video to tell you how it happened; the upright piano the future maestro learned on; and the New York Times front page documenting his career-launching conducting debut with the New York Philharmonic, when he stepped in at the last minute after Bruno Walter fell ill. He was 25 years old.
If you didn’t know this about the world’s most popular maestro—or only learned of it in recent years—it’s not surprising. His “perfect” family life as husband to the glamorous Montealegre and the father of their three children was all that the people in charge of his career thought the mid-20th-century public would tolerate.
